O.B.'d Again...

Although I am a practicing fishetarian, I have a weakness for bacon. When I first stopped eating meat almost 20 years ago, I missed several meat categories. I used to miss eating turkey, ham steaks, and bacon. Then I tried these longed for foods many years ago after several years of not eating meat and found them gross. There is something about the texture of meat that is really strange if you don't eat it for a long time. The only meat that lingers on in my affections is bacon. Something about the salty, fatty, crunchiness of bacon keeps me coming back for more.

I have a deal with myself where I get to eat bacon once a year. I know, it is a pretty random decision (why once??) but it is a compromise that I can live with. For the past several years I have broken my arbitrary rule and had bacon twice or three times within a year. Last year we were staying at a dude ranch in Texas with my Stu, Barbara, and Jim (and all of our kids) and they had a breakfast buffet that included bacon. I ate bacon two mornings in a row and by the second morning I was sick of it. I call this condition, "over baconed". I have been over-baconed once or twice in the past.

If you only eat bacon once a year there is something of a strategy to timing it right. You don't want to eat your bacon on New Year's day because then you have a whole 364 days to go without bacon. This year I made it to the first day of April before having my celebratory bacon. I was out to lunch at a restaurant with a new park intern and they had BLTs on the menu. I haven't had a BLT with real bacon in 20 years (I make BLTs at home with fake bacon every once and a while. They aren't bad). So I had a BLT. There was so much bacon on that sucker - by the end of the meal I was over-baconed. That's it for my bacon consumption for 2008. It was delicious.

Hate Barbecue, Love Whales

My print zine had a regular feature called Rants and Raves where I complained about things that were annoying me of late and wrote accolades to things that I found wonderful and quirky. This is my first on-line installment of Rants and Raves.

Hate Barbecue - Rant
Yesterday I had the pleasure of a trip to the Huntington Botanical Gardens for work (http://www.huntington.org/BotanicalDiv/HEHBotanicalHome.html). I went to give a short presentation on how invasive plants are wreaking havoc on national parks, and my park in particular. I was excited to get to go to the Huntington for work and the junket included a tour of the new Chinese Garden with the director of the Huntington and a free lunch to boot. I must admit that I was pretty darn excited about the free lunch. I have a hard time getting up in the morning lately, perhaps due to the fact that my extremely cute baby freaking wakes me up every 2 hours, or one hour, or 30 minutes, all night long. I can't motivate to make my lunch the night before or, even worse, I fall asleep at 7:30 while putting the aforementioned baby to bed. Either way, I've had trouble with the whole lunch thing recently. So when I learned that I got to go to the Huntington, get a garden tour, and a free lunch to boot, I thought, "hot diggity dog, tomorrow is going to be a good day!!" Little did I know that the free lunch was going to be...barbecue.

Let me just say, that as a vegetarian, barbecue pretty much sucks. I like veggie burgers and tofu dogs as much as the next person, perhaps more. In fact I use tofu dogs as a litmus test of places I would be willing to move to: if it has tofu dogs in at least one of its grocery stores, then I could move there. But to be honest, I like my veggie burgers fried on the griddle with olive oil. And I like my tofu dogs with chili. I find both of them to be average at best when grilled. Yes, there are yummy portabello mushrooms grilled but they don't contain much protein and I need my protein! I'm not a big fan of cooked vegetables and that lack of enthusiasm extends to most grilled vegetables. So overall, barbecue is not my cup of tea. And recently, I have been to at least three functions (two of them National Park Service functions that you would think could at least give a nod to the groovy vegetarians among us) that were freaking barbecues. I've had it with barbecues. ENOUGH BARBECUE ALREADY!!

And there is more freaking barbecue to come. In May at our 24 hour species inventory called the BioBlitz (see http://www.nationalgeographic.com/field/projects/bioblitz.html for more info. on the BioBlitz), the free celebratory dinner for all of us scientists is, you guessed it, barbecue. Come on people, this is California for goodness sakes. Can't we do a little better in the culinary arena than barbecue???

Love Whales - Rave
When I was an undergraduate at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington (an awesome school by the way), I had two friends who studied whales, April Randle and Kristin Rasmussen (awesome people by the way). And I used to give them loads of crap for being so cliche and studying whales. Who doesn't want to study whales? In fact people used to ask me if I was a biologist, why didn't I try to talk to dolphins (of course if you're a biologist, you should talk to dolphins). Anyway, one night at a party Kristin and April got me to look at this cool book of whales, and I think at one point we might have seen a whale exhibit, and eventually I admitted that perhaps there was something to this whole whale love thing. They are pretty freaking cool. This may be one instance why something is popular for a good reason.

Then after moving to Ventura, I've gotten to see dolphins, both small and large groups, swimming in the ocean at different times. And they are so awesome that it makes me all teary-eyed just to see them. They seem so darned happy.

So yesterday, as I was driving back from my barbecue at the Huntington, I heard this great story on NPR on the show The World, about how this dolphin helped rescue two beached pygmy sperm whales that had beached themselves in New Zealand. It was the coolest story. People had been trying to get the whales to go back into the water and swim a narrow channel back out to the ocean for hours but they were having absolutely no success. The whales were determined to stay mired in the sand. The volunteers had pretty much given up and were getting ready to euthanize the two whales because they would die soon by being crushed by the weight of their own organs after being out of water so long.

Then along came this dolphin that people had seen swimming along the beach on several previous occasions. This dolphin was known for playing with people and being very inquisitive. The dolphin swims up and it starts talking to the whales. Obviously the people couldn't understand what the dolphin was saying but the whales were talking back and all of a sudden the whales had a complete change of attitude. They moved off the sand with the help of the people and followed the dolphin through this tricky narrow channel and out to sea!!!

They have patrolled the beaches for the last several days and the whales are gone, successfully rescued and swimming happily in some other part of the ocean. The dolphin, however, has been back to the beach several times to hang out. The main volunteer (a biologist who studies whales - as all good biologists should), actually went into the water and gave the dolphin a pat on the back. Hear the story from PRI here http://www.theworld.org/node/16597?answer=true More on pygmy sperm whales here http://www.cms.int/reports/small_cetaceans/data/K_sima/K_sima.htm

What an excellent story. I just had to pass it along. Of course it made me cry. Those whales and dolphins, they sure do kick butt. Who wouldn't want to study them?

Beans and Rice

Mitch (my main man) and I are vegetarians. Well, fishetarians really. We eat any fish on the Monterey Bay Aquarium green (and sometimes yell0w) list. My friend Matt calls this West Coast Vegetarianism. Anyway, suffice it to say, that other than my yearly forays into bacon (to be covered in another post, see OB-over baconed), we don't eat much poultry, beef, lamb, pork, etc. We decided when we had kids that we would not ask them to be vegetarians but we wouldn't stock our refrigerator with lots of chicken sticks either. What this means practically is that our girls (2.5 and 0.5 years in age) don't eat much meat. Josie (0.5 years) actually doesn't eat any meat at all since she is a breast-milk only kind of person at this point.





One of the unanticipated, yet hilarious, offshoots of this lack of meat eating is that Lucy (2.5 years) doesn't recognize any play food meat items as such. Instead, she thinks the peperoni pieces on her wooden pizza set (from Aunt Tiiffany and Uncle Jason) are beans and rice and she calls pieces of pizza that she makes with them on them her "beans and rice pizza". The pepperoni pieces in the First Five pre-school fake food set she thinks are berries.





So far Lucy doesn't seem to like meat much anyway. The times she has had turkey, chicken fingers, pepperoni and other meaty items with family or when we are out to eat, she has not been keen on. She is a big fan of the bacon that our buddy Elise sometimes gives her.... That might be genetic.





Only time will tell what other random noise having fishetarian parents will generate. For now, I say rock-on beans and rice pizza girl.